Facing each other in the Crossroads Classic at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, the neighborhood rivals looked to be a teensy bit mismatched as they took the court at the start Saturday. IU was perfect through 10 games, Butler was 8-2 and had been beaten rather comfortably by Xavier and Illinois. And, at power forward, the Bulldogs’ Roosevelt Jones gave up 5 inches to Hoosiers senior Christian Watford.

It turned out not to matter much which team was bigger or which had the grander reputation. Butler so furiously outfought IU in general—and Watford in particular—on the boards that Hoosiers coach Tom Crean eventually gave up on playing Watford and went with a smaller lineup. Crean also chose to keep 7-foot All-American center Cody Zeller on the bench for the final possession of overtime, trying to avoid being caught in a disadvantageous defensive switch, and that cleared the lane for 5-11 Alex Barlow to drive to the middle and score the game-winning turnaround in an 88-86 thriller.

“The bottom line for us: We didn’t rebound the ball today,” Crean said. “We missed some shots, we missed some free throws, but for me the big theme for where we’ve got to improve is in our rebounding.

“They got garbage baskets, and I don’t mean garbage in a negative term. I mean it in a positive term. They got more layups than we did.”

The final tally in the rebounding column was Butler 40, Indiana 38, but that does not come close to capturing the differential between the two teams, which is why Crean kept returning to the topic of rebounding as he navigated an 11-minute postgame press conference.

Watford entered this season as a pro prospect but is not playing at that level. His shooting remains a potent weapon, and his rebounding numbers are up, but this is the second time in a big game—following North Carolina at home—he was unable to last even 25 minutes. Some of it was foul trouble, but he finished with one defensive rebound in 23 minutes played. That rounds out to two had he gone the whole 40.

Watford’s struggles developed at the worst possible time. Indiana’s frontcourt reserves are either recovering from injury (Derek Elston) or just coming off suspension (freshman Hanner Mosquera-Perea, who played three minutes against Butler). When Watford’s not earning his minutes, he is being replaced by someone smaller. And that’s not really helping in the rebounding department.

After the game, CBS Sports analyst Clark Kellogg asked Jones—who delivered 16 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists—how he was able to play with the big guys inside.

“I’ve been doing it my whole life,” Jones said.

Well, yeah, until Saturday, when he was pretty much looking most IU players in the eye because it was usually someone like 6-6 Will Sheehey defending him.

Zeller also failed to assert himself as a rebounder. He got five, compared to nine for Butler’s 7-foot Andrew Smith.

Crean said he expected that when he looked at the tape he would be “disappointed in some of our contact on the blockouts.”

The bottom line for Indiana is it was bound to end up paying the price at some point for the lack of interior depth that struck over the first third of the season—something that should be reversed as the Hoosiers approach Big Ten play. If Mosquera-Perea is as helpful as Crean projects him to be, he’ll either push Watford to do his job better or start taking his minutes.

“I’m excited about getting back to practice,” Crean said Saturday night. “I’m excited about the rebounding drills we’ll be doing. I’m not sure there’ll be many people sharing that joy with me. That’s an area we’ve really got to shore up for ourselves.”